26 June 2012 7:36 PM

You will be pleased to know that the BBC’s coverage of the Arab spring was impartial. I know, because the headline on the BBC website about an inquiry into the matter says so.

If you look at the story underneath you will find that this actually means ‘generally impartial’. The coverage could also have done with ‘greater breadth and context.’

After that the BBC website’s tale about the inquiry goes on about how courageous and remarkable the BBC reporting was, and so on.

I got stuck on that difference between ‘impartial’ and ‘generally impartial’. If you think about it for a minute, you will realise that ‘generally impartial’ means ‘sometimes not impartial’, or, to put it more bluntly, ‘not impartial’.

The meaning of ‘impartial’ and ‘context’ and one or two other interesting little words has a tendency to go in and out of focus at the BBC these days.

It is not as if the analysis of the BBC’s coverage of the first months of upheaval in the Middle East was carried out by some vicious right-wing bigot, determined to do down the Corporation and probably in the pay of Rupert Murdoch. It was commissioned by the BBC Trust, and led by Edward Mortimer, a former Financial Times leader writer and UN communications chief who is not famous for wanting to upset apple carts.

You have to be careful about these things, of course. People have for years criticised the BBC over its reluctance to use the word ‘terrorist’ to describe those who use indiscriminate and deadly violence against ordinary people in order to achieve political aims.

But then suddenly terrorists morph into highly respectable politicians, just like Martin McGuinness has done.

It seems unlikely that cameras will be present when the former IRA commander meets the Queen, which is a shame. I have a mental picture of Her Majesty, wearing immaculate white gloves, gingerly shaking the McGuinness paw while inquiring: ‘And what do you do?’

It was a very senior BBC executive, however, who put forward the idea that its journalists should be guided not by old-fashioned stick-in-the-mud anachronistic impartiality, but by ‘radical impartiality’.

This thinking from Peter Horrocks, head of television news at the time, meant you would be encouraged to put the Taliban or the BNP on air as long as you gave room to ‘the full range of moderate opinions’.

To many people this looked like giving terrorists and the far right a platform. It wasn’t any kind of impartiality, it was propaganda.

The same Mr Horrocks is now director of BBC Global News – I thought the title was something out of a sitcom but it appears to be real – where he has just told 2,400 journalists that they must ‘exploit new commercial opportunities’. If that sort of thing had been done by a Murdoch editor I suspect it would now be attracting the attention of Lord Justice Leveson.

The Mortimer report raised questions about how the BBC used another of those little words when it was reporting the Arab Spring: ‘regime’. Mr Mortimer pointed out, gently, that the word regime might be a bit pejorative.

In other words, the BBC was showing contempt for the dictators of Libya and Syria and conferring legitimacy on the rebels.

What else did Mortimer say? In Libya, the BBC was slow to shine a spotlight on human rights abuses by the rebels. In Syria, it may have ‘overestimated the purely peaceful or nonviolent character of the protest movement in its early stages.’

In Bahrain, Mortimer said, early BBC reports failed to explain the context. This meant they didn’t tell you how the protests were run by Shias against the Sunni rulers, and how the Sunni rulers believed the protests were being orchestrated by Iran.

The BBC ‘almost completely ignored’ a period when security forces were more restrained and the Bahraini ruler tried to do a deal with the protesters.

These are not trivial mistakes. The problem is that they point in one direction: the BBC favoured the rebels against the established governments. This is not only a serious failure of impartiality, it means potential dangers for the paying audience in this country were being covered up.[related]

The BBC didn’t seem to want to tell us the news we have now had from the head of MI5: that the Arab Spring has furnished Al Qaeda with ‘a permissive environment’.

I do not know how the Arab Spring will turn out and whether it is good news or bad news for the countries concerned and the rest of the world. But it wasn’t the BBC’s job to make my mind up for me.

This all comes less than a month after the Jubilee debacle when the BBC sent out pop culture presenters to cover a state event and proceeded to broadcast a fashion pundit talking about the hat Nelson wore at the battle of Waterloo.

We know the BBC has let us down badly with consistently slanted news broadcasts about matters of central importance: Europe, immigration, climate change. It has done nothing to challenge the perception that it routinely favours one political party over others.

But once upon a time everybody felt safe to rely on the BBC to report the really big foreign stories and the really big Royal occasions. No longer. The reputation of the Corporation is rotting

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14 June 2012 1:22 PM

Lots of children escaped from poverty last year, according to the official figures. Hooray!

Only thing is, they weren’t any better off. The actual buying power of the households in which they lived didn’t change.

How can this be?

We are in the realm of poverty figures here, a field of social scientific inquiry roughly comparable to the outer fringes of cosmology. Space is curved, an astronaut who travels to the Andromeda galaxy will meet herself coming back, that sort of thing.

All that speculative astronomy is just wormholes to me. But I can tell you how it came about that, in the world of poverty research, you can get richer without having anything more to spend at all.

Way back in the 1960s – you probably guessed – there were academics and campaigners dissatisfied with the idea that the post-war welfare state had ended poverty. It was true that the NHS was providing free healthcare for everyone, and that national assistance, as welfare benefits were called at the time, meant unemployed people were much better off than they had been in the past.

That wasn’t good enough for the left. Marxism decrees that the poor must get poorer because of the evils of capitalism. So poverty was re-invented.

The trick to doing this was the idea of relative poverty. Being poor, the theory went, is not a matter of what you actually have. Not in a modern western society, dear me no.

The only proper way to measure poverty is to compare what people have to what everybody else has.

So what you do is, you take a set proportion of average income and say that is the poverty line, and anybody below it must be poor. The line has generally been set at 60 per cent of the income of the average home, with the average calculated so as to remove the skewing effect of the super-high incomes of very rich people.

There is a beauty to this method of measuring poverty. It means that if society as a whole gets richer – and it has in a big way over the past 50 years – you will get more poor people.

As the wealth of the average person goes up, so there are certain to be more people below that 60 per cent line. Hey presto! Marx was right! Desperate poverty is everywhere and we are grinding the faces of the dispossessed.

These arguments, strongly championed by Gordon Brown in the days before Labour came to power in 1997, led to some hilarious excesses. I can remember one famous television cook claiming that a family were in terrible poverty if they had trouble affording new trainers to keep a teenager up with the fashions of his friends.

A television company pronounced that no boss should earn 20 times more than their lowest paid employee. Its boss was on around 40 times more than his lowest-paid employee.

People started to wonder. They puzzled over the way, under the relative poverty measures, Britain appeared to have much worse poverty than, say, Costa Rica. They noticed that you could have several televisions, a freezer and a dishwasher, mobile phones, a computer and a car and still be counted poor.

People started to say, these figures don’t measure poverty at all. They measure equality.

To their credit, Labour politicians had begun to take this into account by the time Gordon Brown went to Number 10. For the last few years, state poverty figures have included an assessment of what children really have – a bedroom of their own, a holiday, a bike, friends round for tea – in an attempt to provide a balancing picture.

But they stuck to grandiose targets for achieving an end to child poverty based on the meaningless relative poverty figures. These targets seemed more and more unachievable as the boom years went on.

Yet now when we have a recession, surprise surprise, child poverty seems to be getting better.

The new figures show that the number of children in homes below 60 per cent of median income fell by two per cent, before housing costs, in the year to March 2011 compared with the year before.

Those of you who have stayed with me through this story will have worked out why already. Median household income in the year in question fell from £432 to £419, the first drop since the 1990s.

The children weren’t any better off. They would have been worse off but for the fact that state benefits went up faster than the incomes of working people. But the poverty figures would still have said the opposite.

That is why Iain Duncan Smith wants to work out a new way of measuring poverty, and that’s why he’s right. We need to be able to see how children are doing in terms that mean something, including the nature of their families and how well they do at school.

And we would all be better off dumping the relative poverty figures into the nearest black hole.

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13 June 2012 3:29 PM

About 18 hours, I would say, between the Home Office assurance that ‘no religious organisation will be forced to conduct same-sex marriage’ and the explanation by Justice Minister Crispin Blunt that this was ‘problematic legally’.

You’ve got to hand it to the bishops of the Church of England, they know how to smoke out politicians who are being economical with the truth.

They also appear to have retained the ability to encourage enthusiastic public debate. Over the past couple of days, since the Church came out so strongly against the Coalition’s plans for same-sex marriage, this harmless bunch of God-bothering bureaucrats have been accused of an extraordinary succession of sins.

According to various representatives of the gay lobby and its supporters, they are liars, they have made the most explosively false claims since Tony Blair’s dodgy dossier, they are obsessed with sex. They are strewn across the tracks of progress. They have been on the reactionary side in almost every political and social reform of the past two centuries.

I know we are all guilty, but that’s ridiculous.

The argument over gay marriage has taken on the constructive and mutually supportive character of a discussion between Russian and Polish football fans. Even the Reverend Giles Fraser is spitting blood.

For a man so opposed to violence that he refused to allow police to ask peaceful Occupy demonstrators if they might like to move quietly on from the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral, this is dangerously angry language. I hope Dr Fraser, the BBC’s favourite lefty vicar, leaves the baseball bat behind next time he visits the Today studios.

In all this excitement, it can get quite hard to keep your eye on the ball.

So, liars. We know now that the Government have been at it. The assertion that religious marriage would be unaffected, a centrepiece of its consultation paper on same-sex marriage, was a lie.

We know that from Mr Blunt, and from David Cameron’s parliamentary private secretary Desmond Swayne, who said he wanted to see same-sex marriages in church and added: ‘the world changes and this is a liberalising measure.’

Mr Swayne’s boss used to say it was a conservative one, but, never mind, the world changes.

Did the Anglican bishops lie when they said this week that they had supported the introduction of civil partnerships?

I don’t think you can say the CofE was a cheerleader for civil partnerships. But in 2005, six months before the civil partnership law went into operation, they declared that there was support in the Church for an end to discrimination against gay people.

The bishops ‘did not want to exclude from fellowship those lay people of gay or lesbian orientation who, in conscience, were unable to accept that a life of sexual abstinence was required of them and instead chose to enter into a faithful, committed relationship.’

In plain language, that’s OK, come in.

The difference this time is that the fight is not about gay rights, it is about marriage. This is something which, as the bishops have pointed out, concerns not the interests of an influential minority, but everybody.

Once you start tinkering with the meaning of marriage, where do you go next? Seven years ago, there were Government assurances that gay marriage was not a possibility. What becomes possible seven years from now?

We know politicians do not love marriage, except for their own families. That is why they have tried to remove all references to it from Government documents and forms, and why they are slow to act on their promises of tax help for married couples.

This matters to all of us, because marriage remains overwhelmingly and by all available measures the best and most stable method of keeping parents together and helping their children grow up healthy and educated.

When the ties of law and tradition weaken, and couples are less firmly bound together by mutual understanding and financial advantage, then you get trouble.

Look at the figures for crime, poverty, ill-health, anti-social behaviour and so on in broken and single parent families. And, of course, it is the children of poor and working class families who suffer most from single parenthood and serial step-parenting.

Politicians of all parties love to bang on about social mobility and how opportunities for the poor must improve. But they destroyed the grammar schools that gave a generation of working class children a decent chance in life, and now they are destroying the foundations of families that do the same.

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12 June 2012 2:49 PM

Here’s a statement from the Home Office which Theresa May hopes will shut down the increasingly out of control debate over gay marriage. Mrs May is anxious to slap down the Church of England and its claim that the European Court of Human Rights will intervene in British marriage law.

‘We have been clear that no religious organisation will be forced to conduct same-sex marriages as a result of our proposals,’ the statement goes.

Once upon a time a declaration like that from a senior Whitehall ministry would have been enough to calm the bishops and reassure the public. You can’t mistake its meaning.

But the credibility of the Home Office has now reached the point where no-one, but no-one, believes them any more.

This is the ministry whose rather important immigration operation was described not so long ago by its own Secretary of State as ‘not fit for purpose’. That was before it generated huge immigration queues at the airports in time for the Olympics.

It cannot get to grips with crime and its reputation is such that the last government took away its historic control of the prisons. It runs in fear of the police and their overweening union, the Police Federation.

The Home Office remains powerless to deport hundreds of foreign criminals who claim their human right to a family life is more important than the violence and thievery they inflict on the public.

You will recollect that a family life, as far as the courts are concerned, consists of claiming to have a girlfriend, or, in one notorious case, a pet cat called Maya.

In a decade of running battles between the Home Office and the judiciary, the judges have yet to lose a single one.

At the weekend Home Secretary Mrs May announced that she was going to get Parliament to vote to tell the judges to tone down their valuation of the human right to family life when it comes to deportation cases. It is hard to find anybody at Westminster who believes the courts will take the slightest bit of notice.

Most tellingly for this matter, it cannot remove the Jordanian terror suspect Abu Qatada from the country. The European Court of Human Rights won’t let it.

When it comes to the European Court of Human Rights, the Home Office isn’t even in the game. This great department of state just lies down and dies whenever a motley bunch of questionably qualified legal functionaries from an interesting and varied collection of countries tells it what to do.

You can tell the bishops of the Church of England are really angry about this one from the nature of their language. The Anglican church is, by long precedent, run by dons and civil servants, and its default position is to express its views in phrases so drenched in obscurity that no-one can work out what is going on without a decade of training in cracking the codes.

Read any speech by the Archbishop of Canterbury and you will see what I mean.

This time words used have included ‘half-baked’, ‘very shallow’, ‘superficial’, and ‘completely irrational’. A serving Home Office minister has been chided, by name and in print, for actions which are ‘not the right way for addressing a subject of this significance.’

It is worth noticing that among the CofE figures dealing with the same-sex marriage consultation is its most senior official, Secretary-General of the Archbishop’s Council and the General Synod, William Fittall. Mr Fittall is by training a civil servant, who spent many years in high level and politically very sensitive jobs in one Whitehall ministry.

You should not need me to tell you that ministry was the Home Office. Mr Fittall’s predecessor was there too. Cosy, that’s what you would say the Home Office and the Church used to be.

A couple of other things have wound the churchmen up in all this. Lynne Featherstone, the Equalities Minister who stands accused of doing things in ‘not the right way’, is one.

Miss Featherstone declared as she launched her consultation paper that: ‘Marriage is a celebration of love and should be open to everyone.’

Anyone who had spent five minutes considering the legal, social and historic role of marriage would never have said such a thing. In fact, no-one who had so much as read a divorce case report in the papers should have been capable of making a remark so crass. She seems to be confusing the wedding reception with the marriage.

Churchmen were also extremely unhappy the other day to hear the chief of Stonewall, the gay lobby group, describing opponents of same-sex marriage as ‘bigots’. Apart from the offence, which was taken, they think Stonewall is extremely close to the Home Office these days.

Whatever their other failings, the bishops of the Church of England are intellectually capable, careful, and well-connected. They did not make up their opinions on what the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights will do to the Home Office’s assurances on the immunity of the Church from gay weddings.

They won’t say who gave the legal opinion. But it is unlikely to have been any lawyer, or more probably lawyers, below the rank of High Court judge.

As the officials of the Church made clear yesterday, the assurances of the Home Office and Downing Street that the churches are immune from same-sex marriage aren’t worth the breath it takes to say them. They are floundering, because they have given so much power to Strasbourg that they can no longer guarantee so much as the time of day.

The truth is that nothing the Government promises to put in a new law is worth a light any more, because Strasbourg can simply overrule it.

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11 June 2012 8:27 PM

It is sad to see Eric Pickles trooping through the broadcast studios trying to defend a scheme to spend £450 million on love-bombing ‘troubled families’.Mr Pickles – fondly known to his fans as Big Eric – has been trying to live up to his reputation as a no-nonsense old-fashioned northern Tory by telling us this means an end to the soft treatment of criminal households and no more social worker jargon.He told us we would no longer be running away from laying blame on the blameworthy. These people are troublemakers and we are going to do something about it, was his gist.The Communities Secretary even drew on his knowledge of Broadway musicals, referring us to West Side Story and Gee, Office Krupke, the song in which 1950s delinquents explain that their mother are junkies, their fathers are drunks, natcherly we’re punks.Bowing to Stephen Sondheim, Mr Pickles said: ‘Some families, they have got the language, they are fluent in social work’.So, you will want to know, who is going to be spending this £450 million to make sure things are done differently in future?Answer: social workers, and the councils who employ them.The idea that the Coalition’s Troubled Families scheme is anything new, or that it will make the 120,000 dysfunctional households supposedly at the root of many of our ills face up to any kind of responsibility, is entirely fanciful. I suspect Mr Pickles knows this, and that’s why he seems less than convincing when he promotes it.What it is going to do is send the drunks on counselling courses and the junkies on the drug treatment programmes that it is very rare for your ordinary, everyday, less generally troublemaking drug addict to get on to.Many hours of one-to-one attention from social workers will teach unemployable single mothers of five how to use a washing machine or sweep the floor. You or I would need to employ a cleaner, but then we are not troubled families and so we don’t qualify.There will be financial advice, which, I suspect, is likely to include instruction on how to claim benefits more effectively. There will be extra medical attention, because troubled families are known to have health problems.There can, for those who show the proper co-operative spirit, be new homes.By this stage it is hard to reconcile the benefits of the Troubled Families scheme to its clients with Mr Pickles talk about ‘a dose of reality’.Working people have to pay a lot of money for somewhere to live. A Troubled Family has merely to assure its crowd of social workers of its co-operation, and, presto, have a house.If you doubt that the scheme described in such tough terms by Mr Pickles is really treating anti-social families to new homes, take a look at his ministry’s website, where it is all set out in ‘case studies’ intended to give us an picture of how, ideally, it should all work.None of this is new. It was all dreamed up in the 1990s, tried out in some very expensive experiments in Dundee and then adopted by New Labour. It was a magic wand to save those few super-destructive households that academics, charity chiefs, state officials and politicians like to say are responsible for many of the little problems of our cities and social housing estates.There is no convincing evidence at all that it works. All the findings from two decades of pouring dedicated social work teams into the homes of bemused criminals and hooligans are disputed except for one clear thing: it is very, very expensive.Perhaps when all those councils who are taking part produce figures on how many thousands of children they have taken off the street and put back in the classroom, how many anti-social youths they have turned into studious and ambitious young men, how many single mothers have gone out to work and stuck at their jobs, we will see how successful this all is. Personally, I doubt it. If this scheme is any change from the process Mr Pickles condemns of identifying troublemakers and throwing bucketloads of money at them, I can’t see it.It is just a piece of warmed-over Blairism.